Energy bills are not the most exciting kinds of messages that we’re all desperate to receive, but they're undeniably important.

Here’s how Bill Hero ensures that our email forwarding system will get these messages delivered to you, even in adverse situations.

Even if the recipient account and inbox are functioning correctly, email systems apply increasingly stringent spam protection measures that invariably will result in some legitimate messages being misclassified as spam.

Email senders have a variety of tools and best practices at their disposal to help minimise deliverability problems, including:

Bill Hero uses all of these tools and best practices to help ensure the highest possible delivery rates for your emails. However, it's impossible to 100% prevent email bounces.

An email 'bounces' when it can not be delivered to the intended recipient. There are two main kinds of email bounce - a 'soft bounce' and a 'hard bounce'.

A 'soft bounce' occurs when an email cannot be delivered due a transient or temporary issue, or due to a policy or filter imposed by the receiving email server.

For example, if the recipient's inbox is over-full, the receiving email server might apply a policy not to deliver any new email messages until the user has archived some old emails.

The most common cause of soft bounce is if the receiving service thinks a message is spam. In this situation, there's no technical reason why the message can not be delivered, but the receiving email server has chosen not to deliver it.

A hard bounce occurs when the recipient’s email address doesn’t exist because the email account was closed, or never existed, or was deliberately created as a 'honey pot' for fraud visibility.

Whatever the cause of a delivery failure, whether it is classified as a 'hard' or 'soft' bounce, email senders can receive a delivery report with some details about what happened and why a message was not successfully delivered to the addressee.

Bill Hero uses any bounce reports to trigger resend and other remedial actions to ensure we maintain the highest possible delivery rates for all subscribers.

Modern email systems maintain a history of interactions with other email systems, and build 'reputation scores' for those remote systems which flow through into the delivery policies for each receiving email server.

A sending domain or IP address with a poor reputation is much more likely to experience soft bounces for its emails due to spam classification, because the receiving systems have low trust for sending domains with poor reputation.

The best email delivery systems are very protective of their sender reputation and will take immediate action to mitigate any risk of reputation damage.

Bill Hero goes to great lengths to use all the available tools and best-practice approaches to minimise any potential issues with delivering forwarded emails to subscribers, as well as Bill Hero's own emails.

Bill Hero has a dedicated email subdomain forwarder.billhero.com.au that we use only to forward messages originating from energy retailers. We never send any of our own original messages from this domain.

Bill Hero's own messages will always originate from the billhero.com.au domain.

A huge amount of specialised expertise is required to manage and run an email platform reliably. We leave this work to the experts, and we currently use two main bulk email delivery platforms for our two main types of transactional email:

Depending on the kind of delivery problem, simply resending a bounced message can often achieve successful delivery. Bill Hero will attempt to resend an email if it bounces.

If a forwarded email bounces that was sent to a subscriber via forwarder.billhero.com.au, our system will send a bounce report message, including the original email content, as an automated bounce report email, originating from the billhero.com.au domain.

The bounce report email is a simple, automated and templated email that contains: